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Wherever we can use two or more different methods on the same rock samples, the methods agree with each other. OK then we have a reliable and accurate method that allows us to date volcanic ash layers.
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The thing is, there are a lot of layers, including multiple different layers of volcanic ash, laid down in different eras. This means we can also estimate the age of the layers in between. The science of this is called lithostratigraphy. What would you say if you had no evidence of anything and you were trying to argue against actual evidence?
You would attack the credibility of the evidence, it is simple human nature, and happens all the time in the court room and real life. In this case they just group all the dating methods as one, refer to it as carbon dating, and then proceed to debunk it with just carbon dating limitations. Just more religious deceit. They seem to think it is a game where if you win an argument, even through deceit, it means you are on the side of truth. Child logic basically, and that is where a lot of our frustration comes from, it is like dealing with uneducated children, and the older they are, the more frustrating it can be.
Then we take a fossil that is supposed to be millions of years old, and the test comes back that it's only 50, years old. Obviously, this whole thing is fake. On their face, their claims indicate a failure to understand what C dating is and what sort of information it reveals. C can not be used to date "fossils". Fossils are rock in the shape of something that was once living.
Carbon dating - RationalWiki
The original material has been replaced by minerals. C dating can only be used to date the remains of living material wood, bone, etc. So, when they claim that they "dated a fossil" or that they got an answer of "a million years" you know they are not actually talking about C Though they are claiming that these tests were all carbon dating, in fact if you read their source material, what the tests are all radiometric dating.
Carbon dating is one form of radiometric dating, but there are many others. A Creationist website wants to trick people who don't have enough information to understand what is happening so they take two objects and do specific radiometric tests on them. Object one is a piece of wood from a tree that died in Object two is a bit of lava from an eruption that took place a million years ago. K-Ar dating can't determine the age of anything less than , years old.
The decay rate is too slow. So, if you test something which is , years old you get ", years" as a date. However, if you test something that is from , you still get ", years" as a date. This is why we don't use K-Ar dating for objects we suspect are younger than , years.
So, when they test the piece of wood, they get ", years" as the date. Radiometric dating gave a date that is too old!
Answers to Creationist Attacks on Carbon-14 Dating
Then they take Object Two which is a great candidate for K-Ar dating and they doing C dating on it. That's a huge red flag for any reputable scientist, but they turn around and tell their readers: This object is supposed to be millions of years old but this says it's 65, years old! C Dating is debunked! If I asked you to measure the length of a road using a 12 inch ruler, the maximum length you would get is 12 inches which is clearly wrong. If I asked you to measure someone's height using an odometer, you would either get 0 or.
The Creationist websites know exactly what they are doing. They are deliberately using the wrong tool in an attempt to confuse their readers. The real question is: That is actually true. Radiometric dating uses the different amounts of radioactive substances in a material to estimate that material's age. To date something that contains carbon, you can measure the ratio of stable Carbon to radioactive Carbon in the object. Because we know how fast Carbon decays and roughly how much should have been present in the first place, we can determine the age of the material.
Once all of the Carbon is gone, which happens on the order of 10's of thousands of years, we can't use this method to date materials. We then have to pick a different pair of atoms with known radioactive properties. Obviously, we need to obtain many pieces of information to use this technique, AND they all have to agree.
If they didn't, we couldn't calibrate the method and the technique would be useless. However, when we take everything we know about ages and combine it, we get a remarkably consistent picture.
Carbon dating
There is, like most popular bullshit, a tiny kernel of truth. The margin of error of carbon dating depends on certain assumptions about the levels of carbon deposit being relatively uniform over time. If it's true that a period underwent a higher or lower rate of deposit, then those assumptions may be off by some fraction. Something dated at 12, years old could be anywhere from 8, to 16, years maybe?
Not to mention that the general scale -- the magnitude -- of RCD is pretty much backed up by other radiometric methods, which are themselves more or less backed up by cosmological dating methods age of Type 1A supernovae, for example , makes the whole debate over dating methods I believe the technical term is "moot as fuck".
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If they're off by an order of magnitude , the universe is still at least 1. Two orders of magnitude? OK, million years old. Making the claim that RCD is merely off by some margin of error makes an unspoken argument a fortiori that the universe is at least many many millions of years old, in the worst possible case scenario. And seriously, a factor of 2 orders of magnitude would have already shown up as error somewhere else.
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Because if all the dating techniques other than literal timestamps weren't debunked, it would challenge creationism. Ergo, they're debunked because it says something the bible disagrees with. How about the massive global carbon and coal deposits which render carbon dating inaccurate?
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My dad has been using this dumb ass argument for years now. I love my father but this is just embarrassing. I guess his lack of knowledge is one of the reasons he has fallen for the Christianity lie. Best resource I've found on it Essentially, some intentionally misinterpret scientific studies and use it to say for our example carbon dating isn't reliable. This quickly gets spread to others who aren't informed on the matter and it snowballs into a "legitimate" debate. In reality we see that carbon dating, while not having the desired accuracy that scientists and historians would like, is still well within the tolerances to be viable for other theories.
A brief overview of how radiocarbon dating works is in this How Stuff Works article. But if you don't want to read that essentially: All life forms have Carbon C in them. We take it in from the environment, but it decays, so we reach a equilibrium. When we die, these radioactive C atoms decay into other elements at a half-life a stable, predictable rate. By measuring how much C is left in an object that used to be alive, we can tell how long it has been dead with some error.
Thank you for looking anyways its appreciated as i appreciate how everyone else has helped me to understand how carbon dating works. Well I think a big part of it is that, and mind you I'm an electrical engineering major, that every scientific method has some margins of error in it, like carbon dating can't be used past a certain time and it won't give you the exact year, month, day,and second to how old a fossil is, but its a very good tool to approximate it.